Monday, October 13, 2014

How to bring social media into your store

Social media is great, but how can you take advantage of it in your store? Bringing ways to interact inside the restaurant is a great way to let customers share how much they enjoy your pizza or your restaurant before they ever leave. Here are three tips on joining together the online and offline experience. This lets you have customers send positive messages about your store out to friends (great word of mouth) or if they have a negative experience, you can catch it and help restore their faith in you before they walk out the door.

#1 - Set up the social media for them

Melanie Addington and her son at Project Pie

While I was visiting Project Pie this weekend in San Diego, I stopped at their Instagram photo booth where you can take a snapshot of yourself and it posts to their Instagram account.

No need to do any signing in or any work. You just hit the button and your experience is shared on the internet. You can always visit the Project Pie Instagram account to reshare the photo from your own account!

Project Pie also takes it a step further by adding an entire area for social media onto their website. Visit https://www.projectpie.com/social to see more of their posts.

#2 - Put reminders around your store
Have your own hashtag you want people to use? Or just want to remind them you are on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram or any other social media? Print the logos or the hashtag and invite them to share their experience on their receipt. Print them on your tabletops, or even make a sign for your wall for when they are ordering. Invite and encourage your fans to share their experience the moment they walk in the door. Put something on the front door or at the exit. Have your wait staff mention any specials for those who tweet about the restaurant.

#3 - Contests!
Have you posted reminders and people just aren't posting about you? Then set up a contest. A great way to do this is invite people to share photos of what they are eating on Instagram to help you build a photo menu. Hold a Facebook contest where the winner gets a free pizza in the store. I really enjoy what some pizzerias do where anyone with a certain name that day gets a % off their order if they come to the store that day. Ginsberg's has five ways you can run a social media contest in your store.